Mark Walston is in his 12th season at Actors Theatre. He's been properties director since 1998.

The most difficult prop to obtain Mark Walston remembers was for Orange Lemon Egg Canary. The magician story culminates with a shocking display: a character balances on a metal spike.

"Finding that spike for the magic trick was a daunting task," says Mark, properties director for Actors Theatre of Louisville. The 2006 festival will complete a dozen years that he’s been building, buying and tracking down props for the slew of festival shows. "We got lucky because one of the magicians who was an advisor for us came across one for sale. If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know what we would have done."

Few spikes are made for the trick. Of those, even fewer are reliable because they don’t come from the designer who created the magic trick. Those are the only ones that are safe, the magician advisors told him.

"The other challenge in that show was the live canary. Canaries are pretty delicate birds and if they are exposed to a draft, they’ll just keel over." The first two they bought did just that, Mark says. After that, they encountered a member of Actors Associates who raised the birds and provided two more.

One year, he spent the six-week period prior to the Humana Festival sewing the Austrian drapes that dressed the set of In Her Sight. "I felt like that was all I did." Another year, he took props artisans and apprentices to harvest 5 vans full of ornamental grass from city-owned freeway ramps to construct the set for Tallgrass Gothic. After they got permission from the city to cut it, they had to paint the dried grass green and fire-proof it. "That was pretty important because there were people smoking in that play. That grass made it a huge show for us."

A team of eight to nine people provide props for all the Humana Festival shows each year, he says. Some specialize in certain areas, such as upholstery, special effects, furniture construction or computer graphics. They draw on a huge stock of props from past shows, including 300 suitcases, 150 vases, 125 armchairs, 30 sofas and sets of dishes, 10 dining tables and about 50 shelves filled with glasses. If they don’t own it and can’t buy it, they build it.

"Things seem to be calm for a while, then all of sudden when the first show is getting ready to tech, it’s like, ‘oh my God, there’s so much to do in the next three weeks,’ It’s sort of out of your hands and you have to go with it," he says. "That’s what happens every year."

Perhaps the most intense festival finish for the props shop came in 1996, when the props master suddenly realized they had to build 10 tombstones for Tony Kushner’s Reverse Transcription." Quite often, we don't think about the ten-minute plays until the very last week. He said, ‘We have to build 10 tombstones today and tomorrow.’ We were pretty proud of how they turned out."

In addition to the added volume, new works require a lot more changes as scripts are revised and reworked. "The people who have been around for more than a year generally know that. You’re not surprised when something turns out not to be needed. The value of it is mostly for the playwright. Here’s a chance for them to see what they’ve written fully realized. It’s an amazing festival. Other people think we’re crazy to do it because it’s such an intense amount of work."

— Raven J. Railey